She came to tell a story, and she has done it; to see a father, and she has seen one: what’s to keep her now?
Lazarus, of course, died twice. The second time it was for good and all. Travelling east for his bank once, he visited his second and final tomb. It is guarded by ferocious monks, who stick a collecting bowl in your face and make you empty your pockets to see something that, after all, is only proof that miracles do not last. The crippled man walks, but only twice around the churchyard before he collapses in a flailing of limbs. The blind man sees, but the faces he knew in his young days are altered; and when he asks for a mirror, he doesn’t recognise himself at all.
After his daughter has left, Mr Wriothesley comes in. ‘So what about Harry Phillips? Could she tell you anything you didn’t know?’
He says, ‘I see he is a useful man. And mobile.’
‘One might send him after Polo. I do not think Phillips is a papist, sir, for all his pretences. I think he will work for anybody.’
He nods. ‘But I fear only direct force will do for Polo, and a man like Phillips leaves the killing to others.’ He pauses. ‘But no harm to sound Phillips out. Interest him a little. One never knows if there might be a use for him.’
‘After all,’ Call-Me says, ‘you employ Dr Agostino. Even though –’
‘Yes.’ He cuts him off. He uses him even though he suspects him of selling the cardinal. Dr Agostino travels Europe, and sends much useful intelligence back.
He thinks of Tyndale in the bleach fields, his human sins whited-out, speaking from within a haze of smoke. He thinks of the river at Advent, its frozen path. There is a poet who writes of winter wars, where sound is frozen. The soil beneath the snow seals in the noise of stampeding feet, the clank of harness, the pleas of prisoners, the groans of the dying. When the first rays of spring warm the ground, the misery begins to thaw. Groans and cries are unloosed, and last season’s blood makes the waters foul.
Now Tyndale has put on the armour of light. On the last day he will rise in a silver mist, with the broken and the burned, men and women remaking themselves from the ash pile: with Little Bilney and young John Frith, with the lawyers and the scholars and those who could barely read or read not at all but only listen; with Richard Hunne who was hanged in the Lollards’ Tower, and all those martyrs from the years before we were born, who set forth Wyclif’s book. He will clasp hands with Joan Boughton, whom he, the Lord Privy Seal, saw burned to bone when he was a boy. In those blessed days the whole of creation will shine, but till then we see through a glass darkly, not face to face.
Somewhere – or Nowhere, perhaps – there is a society ruled by philosophers. They have clean hands and pure hearts. But even in the metropolis of light there are middens and manure-heaps, swarming with flies. Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.
II
The Image of the King
Hans does not like the
The king has not decided yet what kind of portrait he wants. He might ask for anything, from a picture that covers a wall to a miniature you can hold in your palm. But he agrees to be crimson. Each ruby is a tiny kindling fire.
In the kitchen at the Rolls House, the Lord Privy Seal holds a white basin, within it a pool of green oil, in which he is dipping pieces of bread, and giving them to passing boys to taste. Mathew, bustling in for his portion, sneezes loud enough to crack an egg. ‘That will be the plague,’ Thurston says.
‘Too early for plague.’
‘Then I blame our diet. Englishmen were never made to eat fish. Salt water gets in your brain. A German can live on vegetables, he eats what he calls crowte. A Frenchman eats roots and herbs – if he’s famished you just turn him out to grass. But an Englishman is bred on bacon and beef.’
‘An Englishman may ask,’ Mathew says, ‘why we still have Lent. Now we’ve kicked the Pope out, you would think we could enjoy a dish of tripe every day.’
‘The season will be easier this year,’ he says. ‘We can have eggs. Cheese. The king allows it.’
‘Naught but yellow and white,’ Thurston says.
The French and the Emperor are fighting by land and sea. Their war makes fish scarce, and that’s the only reason the king makes a concession. Cranmer complains that at the royal court even the minor feasts of the church are held with all the old superstitious ceremonies. How then can he convince the simple people to labour on saints’ days, instead of drinking ale under a hedge: to till and sow, instead of playing skittles?
‘There are willing butchers enough,’ Thurston says. ‘A man can purchase flesh even on Good Friday, if he has a shilling and a good wit.’
